Scientists Debate Robotic Hubble Mission

An anonymous reader writes "Some scientists are questioning whether the robotic mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope is worth the risk and cost. After the Columbia disaster, NASA cancelled its shuttle mission to Hubble, and replaced it with a robotic mission. However, the price tag of the robotic mission is between $1 billion and $2 billion, almost the cost of a new space telescope. Optics expert Duncan Moore is unsure whether the mission will bring the most scientific return per dollar spent. Hubble director Steven Beckwith says the mission will lead to breakthroughs in space robotics."

Comments

But think of how cool it would be...

[f4llenang3l]

... to have robots with hands in orbit! I mean, we could make giant shadow puppets on the Great Wall of China!

Why not contract it out?

[Bill_Royle]

I'd suggest that the folks at SpaceShipOne could do it for a lot less money. Heck, set up a contest for it - then you're encouraging innovation in the field. With the savings you could garner you could probably divert that to other projects... or buy more $10k toilet seats.

Why crash it into the ocean?

[mykepredko]

If they're not going to fix it, I'd like to understand why they must crash it down into the ocean? If they're going to send a propulsion module up there, why don't they move the Hubble to a Lagrange point between the Earth and moon?

I realize that it will probably take years to get there but I've seen a few proposals for future space stations being placed at the Lagrange points - wouldn't it be nice if they had a high-quality (maybe not as good as when launched) set of optics waiting to be used in a station observatory? I realize that there is a (very) good chance of this never happening, but it seems a damn sight better than crashing Hubble into the Pacific.

myke

Re:$2 billion??

[eclectro]

Wouldn't it then make more sense to spend the cash and resources on improving/fixing/replacing the shuttles, so that we can safely send humans to do the job?

I really think that NASA has a lot of dirty little secrets that no one on the outside knows about, and after this last accident they probably looked close and hard and realized that the number of places the shuttle could catastrophically fail is more than they originally thought.

If there was another shuttle failure (even if it did not result in the loss of life) I suspect that there would be a noticeable chorus to dismantle the agency, that cannot produce very much more than kitsch science and photo ops with school children on the ground.

Though unspoken, I think the three strikes and you're out rule may be in place here. NASA since apollo has always been an agency with self-survival first in mind, so I would not be surprised if they find a way to retire the shuttles to museums.

So much as replacing the shuttles - I do not think that this will even be considered for the next decade as the cost is too steep. It was hard to justify the shuttles when they were first built (and the reason that the space station was built) in the seventies.

But as can be seen, the space station can work with cheap Russian rockets that are more reliable than the shuttle.

The Hubble was designed so it could be serviced by the shuttle (the other justification for the shuttle). But if the Hubble was designed so that parts could be replaced by dockable unmanned rockets, we would not be in this position we are today with it. For an instant, if the power supply and gyros were on a small module that could dock using conventional rockets. But it is not.

When O'Keefe said that a repair mission to Hubble was "too dangerous," people should have recognized that that was code words for "we need to ground the shuttle permanently now."

The fact is that there are earth based telescopes that are catching up in performance to the Hubble. Add to that the fact that the Hubble is old technology, it's pretty obvious that it's time to move on.

It truly would be a better decision to take the many lessons learned from Hubble design and repair and put those in a new telescope, and send it to orbit on a unmanned rocket.